Living with bullying.

I grew up being tormented daily. I never really knew why kids picked on me; the reasons varied. From kindergarten to the 9th grade I suffered and witnessed various forms of bullying, not just from students but from teachers as well. When I was in the third grade I was in gifted and talented. My class was so cruel to me that I couldn't make good grades and I would take any excuse to stay out of school. It stressed me out to the point that I was actually sick from it. I had to drop out of gifted and talented so I could transfer to a different class. The bullying got worse 7th-9th grade when I transferred to Barton High School. My first day on the bus I sat by myself reading my bible when an older boy targeted me. He asked me what I was reading and when I responded he proceeded to imply that I was satanic. After that just about every person in school would call me Lucifer, Lucifer's daughter, Satan, and other variations of this. Something that I said about the one year anniversary of 911 was twisted and in the 8th grade they added terrorist to the list. At some point the kids found out that I was suicidal and a group proceeded to yell "suicide" at me while I walked back to class from lunch. It was hard. When I was younger I would cry a lot but the older I got I started to use their taunts against them by frightening them. Sometimes scaring them seemed to be the only way to get them to leave me alone. One day in the 8th or 9th grade a group of kids were harassing me so I threatened to kill them. Of course I didn't mean it, but it scared them badly enough to go to the principle. When I told Mr. Bagley what had happened his response was that maybe they picked on me because I had dark hair and eyes. Nothing was ever done about the bullying or about my threat. I came back home to visit one year after I dropped out of school and my friends insisted I had to do something about my little sister. She is a larger girl and has a body odor issue, instead of speaking to her or her parents a teacher stood her up in front of the class and sprayed her with air freshener and air fresheners were hung from her desk. Mrs. Hargraves was one of those teachers who always went a step too far. She was a teacher that loved to publicly humiliate and bully students. I had watched her do it many times to my friends when I had her. Mrs. Macintosh talked all of the senior cheerleaders and a number of the senor football players into viciously harassing a 7th grade girl that she had adopted at one point. Mrs. Bagley had an entire senor English class wanting to kick my ass because I didn't care for the Holocaust book we were reading. She told them that I said that the Jews deserved it. My little brother dropped out of school at Barton and got his GED because he couldn't handle the bullying at the hands of students and teachers. Nobody ever did anything about the bullying. None of these teachers were ever punished for perpetuating it.

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